As a teenager, Granger Smith climbed onto an old tractor with a bush hog hitched behind it. His job was to shred the grass along both sides of the road. He fired up the engine, lowered the mower, and set off in a cloud of dust and noise.
When he reached the end, he turned around to start the other side. Behind him, the grass he had just driven over lay bent flat, slowly popping back up. What went wrong? He had never engaged the PTO, the power takeoff that turns the blades.
“With all the noise and dirt and activity going on, without that PTO turning, there was nothing,” Granger said.
That scene opens Poison in the Well, Granger’s second trade book with HarperCollins Christian Publishing, released September 8. It also pictures his own life before conversion. He had spent years sincerely believing Christ died for sinners, with no saving faith turning underneath.
Granger spent nearly 30 years in music, much of it touring as a country artist. In 2019, his youngest son, River, drowned in the family’s swimming pool, and through the grief that followed, the Lord brought Granger to saving faith. He enrolled at Southern Seminary in 2022 and played a farewell tour the next year, leaving music to train for ministry.
Today he is finishing his MDiv at Southern, serves as a lay elder at his church in Texas, and writes for churchgoers who may not actually know Christ. Seminary shapes every part of that work.
“One of the comforts always that’s ticking in the background is the Southern Seminary preparation,” he said. “It’s that nonstop drip that’s coming in, that’s feeding me.”
Granger takes his courses online. With a family, a church, and a career, he had no other way to study at Southern.
“We could all say online learning is not ideal, but sometimes it’s the only way,” he said. “Otherwise I’m not at Southern.”
Built to Stay
Granger started at Southern in an apologetics program, preparing to answer the questions he heard from audiences outside the faith. But the conversations after those events weighed on him. People shared hard, broken stories, and he flew home praying the Lord would send someone to disciple them.
When he described the burden, a friend told him, “That’s because you have a pastor’s heart.”
“The Lord has built some people with a resilience to go and evangelize and speak and move on,” Granger said. “And then there’s others that he just built to stay. I became more and more aware that the Lord had built me to stay.”
He switched to the MDiv, and in March 2025 his congregation affirmed him as one of seven elders who share teaching, shepherding, and praying. He now accepts far fewer speaking engagements and calls the eldership the greatest office he has held outside of father and husband.
His coursework flows toward his people. During a recent lecture in Jeremy Pierre’s biblical counseling course, Granger paused the video and texted a church member carrying a heavy burden. The text opened a conversation, and the two met for coffee.
“Sometimes a lecture turns into an immediate text that’s an immediate relief on a guy that’s carrying a burden,” he said.
Eleven Check Engine Lights
Granger wrote Poison in the Well for laypeople, many of whom tell him they haven’t read a book since high school. The book grew from his reflection on his own conversion.
“I was someone that always believed that Christ went to the cross and died for sinners,” he said. “So how do I think through someone who believed and yet wasn’t saved?”
Looking back, he identified 11 “toxins” that might have exposed his nominal faith.
“These are not things that immediately will tell someone they’re not a Christian,” he said. “But they could be a smoke detector going off, beeping that something might not be right.”
The question pressed on him as he spoke at churches and heard his former self in the people he met afterward. Two toxins stand out: refusing to belong to a local church and having no relationship with the Bible.
Granger expects critics to say he makes Christianity too hard. That concern shaped the manuscript. He asked fellow elders and trusted pastors to comb the draft for any suggestion that sinners add something to the gospel, and ensured that every chapter states justification by faith alone in plain terms.
“Without justification by faith alone, this would just become a behavior modification book,” Granger said. “It would be a book of checked boxes so that you could either become a Christian or make sure you’re a good Christian, which is the furthest you can get from the gospel.”
He compares saving faith to marriage. A man who claims to love his wife but treats her in unloving ways gives reason to doubt the claim.
“Not because loving actions create love. It never works that way,” he said. “But true love always produces loving actions, and faith would be the same.”
A Redeemed Song
Granger has watched that same pattern, faith first and fruit following, reach even the gift he once set aside. In 2023, he said he would hold off on making music for the church until God redeemed that part of him. That redemption recently began in his living room.
Each morning the Smiths gather for worship, following the spiritual disciplines routine Granger picked up from Southern Seminary professor Don Whitney. The family spends a few minutes in Scripture, prayer, and song. Granger began setting Bible verses to music for his kids. The children started memorizing Scripture, church members asked for the songs, and now Granger records them in the studio.
“It feels so restorative to me to be able to use an old talent that at one time was used sinfully and for selfish reasons,” he said. “It still sounds like the old me. Now Scripture supplies the words.”
Years after that dusty ride bush-hogging the road, Granger’s life still makes plenty of noise through books, podcast interviews, recording studios, and a full seminary course load. But now something turns underneath it all. Faith drives the work, and the work keeps pointing back to his congregation in Texas.
“There is a burden that straddles along with the joy of carrying weight with people,” he said, “but there is nothing else I would rather do.”